Entries tagged with [hobbies]: books

Current Music: Bamboo Bones - Against Me!

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■ This is a copy paste from notes I hope it formats okay.

Visiting family for the holidays! God it’s been forever hasn’t it? (Posting, visiting…)

I’m trialing some new medications this week and taking this time off (about a week for fall break) to review and revisit a lot of old projects I’d put on hiatus, namely some writing stuff and site stuff.

My writing bug for reviews has definitely come back and I’m part-way done with what will be my first in what I’d hoped to be a series of write ups on professionally published Hentai manga from a personal and queer lens more-so than a critical one (though I do occasionally have my criticisms to share)! It feels good to be writing a little bit again even if I still have yet to truly get back to the fiction bug.

I’ve also revisited my Tarot reviews since coming into possession of a new deck The Bound Tarot by Jonathan Grimm.

Along the same lines of touching base with things left abandoned I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I’ve once again fallen deep into reading about the afropunk movement and BIPOC experiences in the punk/hardcore music scene. I’m almost done with Black Punk Now which has been a fabulous spiritual successor to 2003’s Afropunk documentary which I got a chance to nab on dvd from James Spooner’s website directly (along with some cool looking zines!)

If you’re at all interested I’d absolutely recommend checking it out and getting yourself a copy! BPN too as a fun follow up!

In general I’ve tried to put myself on a solid book buying hiatus and push myself to work through outstanding books on my reading list that I’ve purchased but have lain untouched in my little dragon hoard.

The rules are simple, no new books (outside of preorders already committed to) until I knock out the current reading list. And from there I’d like to maintain this system to curb the exponential growth of my library vs functional library space. (It’s never that you have too many books, it’s that you don’t have enough shelves!)

Seeing how many truly unread books I’ve had in spite of buying more was definitely eye opening! So here’s what’s on the reading list currently:

In Progress:

Black Punk Now

The Bloody Chamber

Fear and Desire

Unread:

That’s Revolting

Angels Before Men

Shotgun Seamstress

The Day Hikaru Died Vol. 2 (manga)

Life With the Slime (Hentai)

Race Riot 2 (zine)

How to start a Race Riot (zine)

Muchacha Fanzine #16 Decolonizing Punk (zine)

Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction to Children

Takarazuka Sexual Politics and Pop Culture in Modern Japan

Dementia 21 (manga)

Finished:

Innocent Omnibus 1 (manga)

The Day Hikaru Died (manga)

The God Eaters

Camp Damascus

What Moves the Dead

On a follow up note, I’m a little over halfway meeting my goal of reading 20 books this year! I’ve only got a few months left, let’s see if I can make it!

Current Mood: cheerful

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■ That time of year again, response, more doujinshi!

Wow guys, I’m totally floored by the support and responds to my last little doujin sharing post! I’m working on some Gen/All ages parody books next. As a reminder, I’m using my general access list as a secondary filter for R18 works, including reviews, artist spotlights and analysis for adult content, including lemony doujinshi! See this post to request access if you don’t already have it, if you’re a mutual there’s a good chance you already do but I’ve been known to forget things, so read and comment on that post to request!

Since there’s a nice little community for it, I’ll be posting Twelve Kingdoms Doujinshi reviews and shares over on the 12kingdoms comm as exclusives over there, so they’ll be locked to members and any adult content filters depending on the content of any given book I post on!

I’m still waffling on the idea of supplying scans of full books, even if they’re small and generally not like, the most Quality of images, I’m limited by a heavy old scanner bed that doesn’t play nice with books and look, my priority is preserving the quality of my books!

Secondly, there’s the ethical concerns. A part of me says information wants to be free and valuable niche fandom history like this should be preserved, but as we’ve seen time and time again, scans are a big problem for doujinka and fan artists over seas, I’d hate to contribute to something that takes control the distribution of someone’s work from them… but on the other hand… most of the books I’d be most keen on backing up in this manner are almost a good 20 years old by now. What could it hurt?

Maybe it’s best to leave it at photographs for review purposes or limited scans at least for higher image quality for review purposes… additionally perhaps I could add a generic watermark to dissuade the use of even my couple pages of scans for spreading works around too much? One of the bigger losses in my mind after having left Twitter is losing convenient access to several active doijinka whose work I still follow and support which made it easy to reach out and strike up small conversations, ask for assistance with understanding a story through the language barrier (many djka have been kind enough to write story summaries for me after I expressed interest in their fanworks!)

When it doubt it certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask! But again, in the cases of ,any of these older (10, 15 and 20+ years since publication) works being as old as they are, sometimes pen or circle names changed, sites and emai addresses have gone lapsed and abandoned and the original artists can be all but impossible to find, especially on the western side of the web!

Maybe I’ll cave and make an account on the blasted bird site again for the strictest purposes of communicating with doujinka whose only known contact is twitter but honestly I’d probably be better off following up on email addresses or instead investing in a pixiv account… we’ll see!

At any rate! More doujinshi sharing will definitely be in the future! For those interested, I do have a small subsite dedicated to cataloging my doujinshi collection and offering small comments and such! I do not host scans or images of the interiors currently, it’s really more of an at a glance catalog along the lines of the Doujinshi Lexicon, but be aware a fair amount of my books are R18 and my ships are nasty~! <3

Man, May is almost over, can y’all believe that? My domain’s birthday is coming up, I’ll have had Satsnet online for three years now! And after that of course is the Glorious 25th! I’ll have to do something special, maybe a little doodle?

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys

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■ Shelves for Days

Still plugging away at my new Tarot Deck cataloging and review system/template, but most everything has recently taken a backseat to my current IRL project: Installing some new bookcases!

Things have been going well, I’ve discovered I’ll have the space to install a third shelf and have been using these cases here. They’re a bit of a pain to build but I’ve been chalking that up to being out of shape and building these in an excited fugue state after a full day of work haha! But hey, they’ve been worth it!

So far I’m confident I’ll be able to not only rehouse my entire manga shelf on the new shelves but also be able to re-home all of my nonfiction, graphic novels, novels and some of my smaller art books!

Once they’re finished and fully stocked I’m hoping to collect some flameless/Electric candles for mood lighting/ambience. Been leaning a little more firmly into my “witchy” decor tendencies

As for the old shelf… that’s been an ongoing work in progress as well alongside the new shelf installation, I’m trying to convert it into an easily accessible and tidy alternative to craft supply and sketchbook storage. My priorities in order are the following:

■ Visibility – I want to be able to see what I’ve got in stock at a glance. A problem I’ve run into often with amassing crafting materials has been out of sight, out of mind and its close relative “eeeehn I don’t want to dig out that box”.

■ Accessibility – Close second, if I can’t see it, it’s likely also difficult to hunt down or dig out, I want to be able to locate, grab and go with exactly what I need.

■ Safer Storage – Since getting into book binding and zines I’ve amassed an… amount of paper and I’m always conscious of awkward sizes and large bundles of material I can’t use right away and not having a proper dedicated or large enough space has often endangered some of my more fragile materials with risk of bending, or crumpling

■ Growth Space – Much like with my book cases, I know I’ll be adding to my collection of materials and so I want to design my layout with replacing and adding new materials or tools in mind.

I’ve been trying to avoid sticking things on the top of my shelves for storage, especially my books but honestly, I’m seriously considering making an exception for the largest tools in my crafting arsenal which are currently my book press, my paper guillotine, and my button smasher. All three are large or otherwise a little unwieldly and weird and thus don’t sit perfectly on the shelves, and the only one tall enough to accommodate the button smasher is also the only one tall enough to accommodate many of my more oddly sized sketchbooks, binders of archived, older works and my large format A4 and “oversized” art and reference books, like Always Loyal or my new Twelve Kingdoms art books!

I’ll try to post photos as soon as these projects get closer to completion haha.

Close friends have been getting some of the play by play cause lol I’m just stupid excited to finally have new book cases and a better system going on, its been a huge room rearrangement goal of mine for a long time and once I finally pulled the trigger on cleaning out the closet and getting a new clothing storage system, it was just a matter of getting rid of the old monster room real estate hog, my massively under-used and bulky as fuck second hand dresser + vanity mirror set.

Its just really nice to see a multi-step personal project that involved a lot of saving and planning out finally coming together so well and so quickly! <3